Wounded Tiger by Peter Oborne

Author:Peter Oborne [Oborne, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857200754
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

PART THREE

THE AGE OF EXPANSION

1992–2000

INTRODUCTION

In the wake of the 1992 World Cup triumph, the historian of Pakistan cricket begins to feel sympathy with Edward Gibbon as he came to terms with the final centuries of the Roman Empire. It becomes necessary to deal with a succession of short-lived rulers, installed, deposed, and occasionally reinstalled after regular revolts from the legions. While the army remains full of soldiers of the highest quality, still capable of famous victories, too often it is fatally undermined by indiscipline and corruption. There are welcome intermissions of strong and competent leadership, but none in place for long enough, or with the necessary moral and constitutional authority, to bring about wholesale reform.

Gibbon would have relished the regular episodes of melodrama and farce in Pakistan cricket after 1992. But he would also have looked more deeply, and seen the problems of Pakistan cricket as a reflection of those which beset the Pakistan state itself: crime, terrorism, foreign intervention, a refugee crisis, abuse of power, entrenched corruption and clientalism, environmental degradation, a population explosion and millions more people to feed, house, educate and employ. As he watched the parade of Pakistan governments, civil and military, grappling with such problems with limited success or even making them worse, Gibbon might well have marvelled at the enduring power of Pakistan’s cricketers to bring joy and hope to their followers.

So, for the following two decades, I shall partially abandon the generally chronological approach of the years before. Instead, I shall be focusing on the dominant issues which shaped Pakistan cricket in the modern period. The chapters will deal with Pakistan’s invention of reverse swing, which changed fast bowling across the world; the persistent scourge of match-fixing; cricket’s explosive expansion beyond its roots in the urban middle-class; the spectacular rise of Pashtun cricket; the dramatic story of women’s cricket in Pakistan; the financial revolution in the sport; and the consequences of Pakistan’s recent international isolation.

One crisis has succeeded another, and lurking behind all of them has been the perennial failure of leadership, on and off the field. I will do my best to give meaning to the ‘churn’ of captains and administrators, and the baleful influence of national politics which has left Pakistan cricket unable to cope with the fallout from problems which confront the whole nation.

But I will also celebrate the extraordinary expansion of the game of cricket in Pakistan. I will show how it was embraced by the mass of working people, urban and rural, in a way that was unimaginable before 1980. I will also tell the story of how, at last, women took up the national game in a purposeful way, and describe the problems they have been forced to overcome. The game even escaped the dictatorship of daylight. The arrival of electric light meant that a great deal of Pakistani cricket, down to the lowest club level, is now played at night-time and thus out of the heat of the day. I will show how, again and again, the sport of cricket gave meaning and common purpose to a nation in other ways at war with itself.

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